Fish and Game Commission President Dan Richards with mountain lion he shot after grueling hunt in Idaho

The divide between those who live in rural areas and those from cities ruptured wide this past weekend across America in a debate over a provocative photo of California Fish and Game Commission President Dan Richards and a huge mountain lion he shot legally after an 8-hour hunt in Idaho.

Some comments on Facebook suggest that Richards should be the one hunted and shot, that he should be jailed, that is unethical to shoot anything you do not eat, and hunting of any kind is barbaric.

Most from rural backgrounds would see nothing wrong with the photo. Mountain lions are predators that kill lots of deer and other animals, including house pets and farm animals, and fewer of them means more of just about everything else. Same with coyotes. Since the hunt occurred in Idaho, where mountain lion hunting is legal, there was nothing illegal about anything Richards did.

The photo first appeared in Western Outdoor News at http://www.wonews.com/Blog.aspx?id=1646 as an innocuous sidebar to a column post by Paul Lebowitz, 2010 California Outdoor Writer of the Year. The Humane Society of the United States, an anti-hunting organization, then copied and circulated the photo around the country.

It will likely go viral this week as more people copy and exchange it on social networks.

According to Lebowitz, Richards said the hunt occurred earlier this month in steep terrain in remote Idaho that required him to hike eight hours in snow. “I’m glad it’s legal in Idaho,” Lebowitz quoted Richards in the caption to the photo.

Some think that mountain lions are a threatened or endangered species. They are neither. Wildlife biologists say that lions are healthy and abundant in much of California. Mountain lions are rather a specially protected species in California by a law created by a voter’s initiative, not by wildlife biologists.

This is one of the hottest tracking outdoors stories in the nation right now, not just in California. The debate is provocative. If you don’t like one side or the other, well, don’t shoot the messenger.